Words, Design, and Play - Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games - page 162

prospect and develop that player into a star by earning skill points based
on their on-court ef orts. Modes like My Player are fairly standard in sports
games, and their design enables players to engage in a dif erent sort of play
while establishing identifi cation with dreams they are unlikely to ever reach
outside of video games. I can customize my Chris Paul, making him taller
and faster than I will ever be. The design of the game enables me to pick
up the Gothic-style C neck tattoo I would never get in real life and earn
my own signature shoes. Although all these elements of design are key to
the discursive construction of My Player in NBA 2K11 , there are two other
areas in which the rhetorical force of the design of the game has a tremen-
dous impact on the discourse of video games.
I fi nd the most interesting part of creating an avatar is pushing the limits
of the character creator to see what can and cannot be allowed. Can I create
a skinny character? A fat one? What about their biological sex? Can I create
a woman? Which skin tones are enabled and which are not? NBA 2K11 has
a number of limitations, like a relatively limited range of options for how
unchiseled your avatar can be and the fact that you can only create men,
but the most interesting design constraint is the availability of six dif erent
skin tones. As a particularly pasty-skinned redhead, I often choose the pal-
est skin tone available. Normally there are several suitable options available
for the pigment challenged. However, in NBA 2K11 the lightest skin tone
prompted my partner to ask if my avatar was of a mixed race descent. In
opposition to World of Warcraft , which shipped with very limited dark
skin tones for humans, NBA 2K11 ' s six choices start at dark skinned and
do not get all the way to pasty. This design element is fascinating to me,
especially because there are a number of NBA players represented in the
game whose skin tones are far lighter than the choices available in My
Player mode. From the standpoint of wordplay, this design dynamic opens
up a number of questions about how the game's developers perceive their
audience and how they think players would like to be embodied. Adding a
seventh or a tenth skin tone is not likely to be a substantial investment in
design resources. Restrictions, particularly those that appear to be elective,
are quite meaningful. Further, the gap in representation in NBA 2K11 ,
where it is hard to be represented with my skin tone, and in World of War-
craft , where it is hard to be represented with the skin tone of millions of
others, is a powerful statement about each of the games and who the devel-
opers expect to be playing them. Choices of player representation combine
elements of game and social design, as these factors work together to set
the terms for what kinds of games are made and how they are ultimately
designed and made to mean.
Beyond the construction of avatars in NBA 2K11 , the design of play in
the My Player mode is interesting. Players earn the skill points to improve
their player in a number of ways, but the vast majority of their points are
derived from a statistic called “Teammate Rating.” Teammate Rating takes
a number of things into account, but is primarily based on the kinds of